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Power Line posts on “Columbia’s Disgrace.” That would be their invitation to Ahmadinejad.
Mark Steyn Corner posts on the DC dry cleaners who gave up.
John Tierney with a great post on Economists vs. Ecologists.
… The classic example is the “population crisis†of the 1960s and 1970s, when biologists like Paul Ehrlich were convinced humanity was about to suffer massive famines and devastating shortages of energy and other resources because the growing population would exceed the planet’s “carrying capacity.†This concept seemed obvious to biologists who study ecosystems, but economists realized there’s a big difference between animals and humans: Humans are remarkably adaptable and creative. When confronted with shortages and environmental problems, they have a long history of coming up with solutions — new methods of farming, new and cheaper sources of energy, cleaner technologies — that leave them better off in an environment that’s less polluted. .
When the economist Julian Simon pointed this out and predicted that humanity wouldn’t run out of food or energy or other resources in an article in the journal Science, the journal was widely criticized by ecologists and other scientists for publishing the work of an ignorant outsider. Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne, said that economists like Dr. Simon were members of a “space-age cargo cult.†Trying to explain to these economists that commodities must inevitably become more scarce and expensive, the Ehrlichs wrote, “would be like attempting to explain odd-day-even-day gas distribution to a cranberry.â€
So Dr. Simon challenged the supposed experts to pick any resource that was going to become scarce, and offered to bet them it would instead be cheaper in the future. Dr. Ehrlich and two specialists in energy and natural-resource issues, John Harte and John Holdren, picked five metals and bet $1,000 in 1980. Ten years the supposed experts in natural resources had to pay up, because all five metals were cheaper, just as Dr. Simon had predicted. (You can read more about this in my New York Times Magazine article on the bet.) …
Don Surber with more proof Twain was right when he said, “There is no native American criminal class, except for congress.”
You bought Google at $100 and 3 years later is nearing $600 a share? Big deal. Microsoft has gone up 28-fold over the last 20 years? Yawn. You want to make the big bucks? Rent a congressman. Your return on your investment can be as high as $75 for every dollar invested.
Just ask the good folks at PMA Group, a lobbying firm. They sank $1,333,074 into the campaigns last year of 3 Democratic members of the House defense appropriations subcommittee and walked away with $100.5 million in defense earmarks for PMA clients, Roll Call reported.
That means for every buck they spent, their clients got back $75.39. In less than 1 year.
The 3 Democratic rent-to-own congressmen are John Murtha, Jim Moran and Peter Visclosky. These antiwar Democrats see nothing wrong with steering military money to PMA clients. …
John Fund with a short reminder just what a creep Jim Moran is.
IBD Editorial on Canadian Health Care.
Those who hold up Canada’s nationalized system as a model for the U.S. have another piece of evidence that maybe it’s not: Those who are sick and have a choice go to the U.S. for their care.
The most recent example of this trend is Belinda Stronach, a Liberal Party member of Canada’s Parliament and daughter of Canadian billionaire industrialist Frank Stronach. …
Stuart Taylor posts at Volokh on Mike Nifong’s tactics.
… Nifong’s unethical media campaign, his willful blindness to the facts, his rigged photo lineup, his lies to the public and the court, and his concealment of proof of innocence are a rare study in how to frame innocent defendants by using procedural violations to construct a phony case out of whole cloth.
The DA also had accomplices who joined or assisted in his crimes, including some police officers and others, plus enablers who helped him get away with his flagrant misconduct for so long. Subsequent posts will examine some of the enablers. As for Nifong, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper called him a “rogue prosecutor†in April, while declaring the three wrongly indicted defendants “innocent.†The DA lost his law license in a bar disciplinary hearing in June. He was convicted of criminal contempt and jailed for a day this month. And he still faces possible investigation for crimes that could bring serious prison time, including obstruction of justice and violating the lacrosse players’ civil rights.
KC Johnson posts on the fine folks on Duke’s faculty.
Professors like to think of themselves as aggressive defenders of due process. In theory, the academy exists for the pursuit of truth. And faculty members are, in an ideal world, more inclined to embrace the dispassionate evaluation of evidence than the passions of the mob.
The behavior of activist members of the Duke arts and sciences faculty during the lacrosse case contradicted all of these myths about the academy. And most other professors at Duke elected to remain silent as their extremist colleagues rushed to judgment and refused to reconsider their actions.
In March 2006, less than a week after Crystal Mangum’s rape allegation became public, Houston Baker, a professor of English and African-American Studies, penned an open letter demanding the immediate expulsion from Duke of all 46 white players on the lacrosse team. (Several lacrosse players, in fact, hadn’t even attended the party.) Baker mocked the “tepid and pious legalism†that resulted in “male athletes, veritably given license to rape, maraud, deploy hate speech, and feel proud of themselves in the bargain.â€
Two days after Baker’s missive, the former dean of faculty, History professor William Chafe, published an op-ed in the campus newspaper, the Chronicle. Entitled “Sex and Race,†Chafe’s op-ed suggested that the whites who kidnapped, beat, and murdered Emmett Till provided the appropriate historical context through which to interpret the behavior of the lacrosse players. In an unintentional commentary on the article’s intellectual seriousness, Chafe (a historian of civil rights) misidentified the year for Till’s murder, one of the crucial events in the development of the civil rights movement. …
Mr. Johnson with the today’s last Duke post. This continues on the fine faculty of Duke.
While the Group of 88 led a faculty rush to judgment against the lacrosse team, the most striking aspect of the Duke faculty’s reaction to the lacrosse case came in the professors’ utter closed-mindedness as Mike Nifong’s case collapsed in late 2006. For instance:
–History professor Peter Wood claimed, in an interview with the New Yorker, that a lacrosse player advocated genocide against Native Americans. His evidence: an anonymous student evaluation in a class of 65.
–Literature professor Grant Farred published an October 2006 op-ed accusing Duke students of “secret racism†for seeking to vote Nifong out of office; in April 2007, he publicly deemed unnamed lacrosse players guilty of “perjury.â€
–Houston Baker, by this point having been hired away by Vanderbilt, suggested that the lacrosse players might have been guilty of other rapes (he supplied no evidence) and e-mailed one player’s mother that her son and his teammates were “farm animals.†…
… Even now, with Nifong’s case having been exposed as a fraud, only one member of the Group of 88 has publicly apologized. Another privately admitted that she was sorry for signing the statement, but wrote that if she apologized publicly, “my voice won’t count for much in my world.†The Economist recently concluded: “The only people who, it seems, have learned nothing from all this are Mr. Nifong’s enablers in the Duke faculty. Even after it was clear that the athletes were innocent, 87 faculty members published a letter categorically rejecting calls to recant their condemnation. And one professor, proving that some academics are as far beyond parody as they are beneath contempt, offered a course called ‘Hooking up at Duke’ that purported to illustrate what the lacrosse scandals tell us about ‘power, difference and raced, classed, gendered and sexed normativity in the US.’â€
New Editor says tobacco is making a comeback with American farmers.
Thomas Sowell continues his book review with part III of “Mugged by Reality.”
… It would be wonderful to have free and democratic nations throughout the world, and that would very likely reduce military conflicts, as Sharansky and others say. But we do not ensure freedom by holding elections. According to John Agresto, in Iraq “the ‘democratic’ government now entrenched is as sectarian and incompetent as we ever could have feared.” He is unwilling to say that the invasion of Iraq “as originally conceived” was a mistake but he fears that it has become “a tragedy.” This is not a plea for withdrawal. Whatever the situation when we went in, international terrorists have chosen to make this the place for a showdown battle. We can win or lose that battle but we cannot unilaterally end the war.
It is the terrorists’ war, regardless of where it is fought.
Paul Greenberg with good miscellany.
David Bernstein, who blogs at Volokh, with a LA Times Op-Ed on Larry Summers’ dinner date at UC.
The saga of controversial liberal law professor Erwin Chemerinsky’s on-again, off-again deanship at the new UC Irvine law school was highly unusual in two ways. First, the pressure to enforce political orthodoxy at Chemerinsky’s expense came from the right, not the left, and second, academic freedom and 1st Amendment values won a resounding victory when Chemerinsky was ultimately rehired. A more typical example of how academic freedom remains in jeopardy across the country is the UC Board of Regents’ treatment of Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University.
The regents had invited Summers to be the keynote speaker at a dinner tonight in Sacramento. They then uninvited him last week after some UC faculty protested that “inviting a keynote speaker who has come to symbolize gender and racial prejudice in academia conveys the wrong message to the university community and to the people of California.” …
The Captain posts on the Rather/CBS fun.
… That’s not the only concession Rather makes about his integrity. Not only did he purportedly allow CBS to use his outsize reputation on a badly-sourced hit piece, but Rather also argues that he didn’t want to apologize for the Guard story after it collapsed. Rather specifically and personally apologized in a written statement released on 9/20/04, and later emphasized his personal regrets on that night’s broadcast. If he didn’t mean it, why did he say it? Has he always been in the habit of reading text on air in which he doesn’t believe, and then emphasizing his personal endorsement of it?
Now, just as the statute of limitations is running out for a lawsuit, Rather now argues that CBS damaged his reputation. He wants $20 million in real damages and $50 million in punitive damages. In reading Rather’s submission to the court, his own admissions paint him as a hack of the first order who had little reputation left to damage. …
Beldar Blog on Rather/CBS.
… it would be fun to watch CBS be forced to justify its putting of Rather out to pasture in a not-quite-firing by showing all of the grounds it had. Usually in a good juicy family court spat, you find yourself in sympathy with at least one litigant. But here’s a case in which I can just cut loose and enjoy the misery and embarrassment of all concerned! …
Mark Steyn with a Corner post that has fun with Dan Rather’s lawsuit.
Dan Rather was awarded Gay Patriot’s JECBOMA (James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award). Notice was made in July 1st Pickings. We repeat that today.
After much deliberation, we at GayPatriot are pleased to announce that Dan Rather has been selected to be the first recipient of the prestigious James Earl Carter Bitter Old Man Award (JEC BOMA). Named in honor of the nation’s thirty-ninth president, the JEC BOMA honors those men over 70 who, in their dotage, by the very bitterness of their manner, follow in the footsteps of the nation’s worst president. …
Dilbert read about firemen using a lift truck to get a 900 pound man out of his house.